4 May
2013
4 May
'13
4:08 p.m.
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I'm not familiar enough with Judaism to comment on the first
paragraph, but I'm pretty sure that the US mainstreamed male
circumcision primarily for health reasons. IIRC, it reached its peak
in the 1970s and 1980s, and has seen a steady decline since*.
I'm also aware of some people who perform circumcision because they
believe sexual pleasure is 'evil' or something, but if you circumcise
a child at birth, they don't know what they are missing. As opposed to
a friend of mine who was born sans-circumcision, and had to be
circumcised at the age of 18, for health reasons.
Female genital mutilation (removal of the clitoris, etc) is a
completely different thing, and a practice I believe is torture.
However, that seems to go beyond the scope of this discussion.
aestetix
*I don't have a link handy, but there's actually a social movement to
help men regain their foreskins, although the results of the
stretching exercises are dubious.
On 5/4/13 11:04 AM, rachel lyra hospodar wrote:
One of the ways Jews maintained cultural cohesion is
through a
systematic mutilation of their children that, while overtly
hidden, marked them as separate from the culture around them.
In this context it is interesting that the US has mainstreamed
circumcision, and based on first person reports I have heard, in
some ways this does contribute to a global drop in anti-semitism,
which increases cultural diffusion.
Re gender assumptions, 'someday' we 'might' move beyond... feel
free to stop making them at any time. That is something you can do
that would help with our cultural evolution. People often keep
their name, for all the other reasons elucidated here, even when
some of its markers are outdated or overtly misfit. I know
female-bodied people who go by male-marked names. Move past your
assumptions.
Further discussion of names might be informed through reference to
neuroscience, as our name is encoded pretty deeply in the brain,
and we respond to it with a unique signature even in sleep.
R.
On May 4, 2013 10:28 AM, "GtwoG PublicOhOne" <g2g-public01(a)att.net
<mailto:g2g-public01@att.net>> wrote:
Steve & Yo's-
Yes and yes. Similarly in a range of ethnicities:
name-constructions such as "Peterson" implying or directly meaning
"Peter's son" (and in some parts of Northern Europe at least,
similarly for "daughter") or a geographic origin (last name
prefixes that mean "from" or "of" referring to a city or a family
or clan: common all over Europe), or including both the mother's
family name and the father's family name (common in Central
America).
All of these are deeply meaningful in establishing that one is
related to others and connected to a wider web. But today those
social relations are strung across countries, continents, and the
globe, where solidarity and mutual support can be difficult at
best.
To be clear: I don't want to throw away all of those babies with
the surveillance-dystopia bathwater. In many ways I'm very square
and very traditional. But the future we face is one where we are
f-o-o-d for the oligarchy, and social relations are subordinated
to economic relations, unless we make a concerted effort to
overturn the economic relations and assert the primacy of the
social relations.
Now something just occurred to me, and the following may be in the
"not even wrong" category, but none the less I'd be interested in
what you have to say about this:
The Jewish people were until recently a complete diaspora, "strung
across countries, continents, and the globe" at times when there
were effectively no rapid communications as there are today. Yet
somehow the Jewish community on a global scale managed a degree of
resilience that is truly amazing, including during the Holocaust.
We can learn from that.
Somewhere in that history are important lessons that we can apply
in our present struggle with an oligarchy that is downright benign
in comparison to the types and degrees of oppression and
existential threats faced by the Jews throughout history.
Is this something that can be taught and learned, or is it only
something that can be inherited over the course of generations of
history? And if the former, then how can we begin to understand
the lessons?
I'll be AFK until this evening but I'll pick up the thread then.
-G.
=====
On 13-05-04-Sat 10:04 AM, Steve Berl wrote:
Seems to me that traditional Jewish convey family
connections,
and geography. So until very recent times in history, to my
Jewish ancestors, I would be Steve, son of Lou (and Benay added
in more modern times), from New York. It helps to identify just
which Steve you are talking about when gossiping about Steve, and
just what social connections there might be between Steve and
other people. So the name evokes questions like, Oh, your from
New York, do you know xxxx? Or Lou is your father. Are you
related to my 3rd cousin Fred, who has a brother name Lou?
Humans are social animals and our social connections are
important. You are you because of some combination of what you
do, who you know, and who you are related to. Encoding some of
that information in the name has been a convenience developed
over the past 10,000 or so years, and we should consider
carefully whether you are ready to throw it away.
-steve
On Sat, May 4, 2013 at 6:07 AM, GtwoG PublicOhOne
<g2g-public01(a)att.net <mailto:g2g-public01@att.net>> wrote:
Aestetix & Yo's-
Names are nouns, but I puzzle over the term "proper noun,"
because a name is an arbitrary character-string that only appears
noun-like because we say so. A "proper" type of noun should be
one with some degree of linguistic meaning, for example through
etymology ("bike" is a contraction of "bicycle", that has "two
things that rotate", from which we also derive "motorcycle" that
is also colloquially a "bike"), and names should be "improper
nouns" because they don't follow that rule.
The linguistic meaning of "given names" is limited, though
perhaps sufficient for their historic purposes. Conventionally
they convey gender, which is only useful in remotely assessing
whether someone is a potential sex-partner. By geographic origin
they often convey ethnicity, though this is starting to break
down through cultural mixing (most of us are mutts, with two or
more ethnicities in our families). Sometimes they convey
religion, usually by inference from geographic origin or
resemblance to historic names identified with specific religions.
At one time they conveyed occupation, as with "Baker" and
"Smith," though thankfully we have overcome mandatory hereditary
assignment of jobs.
There was a time when we could infer, for example, that "John
Smith" was almost certainly male, probably Christian ("John" as
Biblical name), and probably an ironworker ("blacksmith").
Bluntly put, this would tell you whether John Smith was someone
you could mate with, someone with whom that mating would be
approved by your own church, and where he stood in the
socio-economic hierarchy. The use of "Miss" and "Mrs." for women
("Miss Jane Smith") further emphasized that in a patriarchial
culture, males had a prerogative of ascertaining the eligibility
of females as mating partners.
Today all we can be reasonably sure of is that John Smith is
male. He might be a Buddhist or an atheist by his own choice,
and he probably works at a desk rather than a forge, and his
ethnicity might be a combination of English, French, Kenyan, and
Chinese for all we know.
Some day perhaps we'll have to guess at John Smith's gender. That
would be progress.
-G.
On 13-05-03-Fri 11:30 PM, aestetix wrote:
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You've opened a can of worms here :)
Since elucidated discussion seems to be the modus operandi
lately, I have a few thoughts on this matter that are worth
contributing. Feel free to ignore at your pleasure (free
listening is just as important as free speech).
I think that the two key elements of your essays, food and
power, are rather interchangeable depending on the contexts.
It's (hopefully) obvious why we need food. Power in a more
abstract sense is fascinating to me, though. Other words that
come to mind are drive, charisma, persuasion, but also
intellect, and most important, control.
IMHO, one of the most fundamental elements of control is
language, as shared patterns are effectively a way to
communicate and attain various levels of self-mastery. An easy
way to experience this is to try to understand a foreign
language: there might be some hints of familiarity within the
chaos, and as we find them, it's a bit like setting markers
around, and using the markers to control the direction of your
ultimate understanding. You can extend that to vocabulary and
concepts as well. One of the hallmarks of a good education is
the ability to curse someone out without using the generic
"fuck shit damn" slurs.
Language is composed of words, symbols which point to meanings,
and one of the most interesting set of words is our names. And
you all can guess where I'm going with this one ;)
Hail Eris, aestetix
PS: it might be worth doing another cryptoparty soon.
On 5/3/13 7:58 PM, GtwoG PublicOhOne wrote:
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-- -steve 2) Where the power is, and where it isn't.
Now we come to the proletariat and the
lumpenproletariat.
For this, credit also goes to a good friend of
mine who I
won't name here, but who's welcome to name him/herself if
s/he so chooses: s/he got me thinking down this trail a few
months ago.
The proletariat is the working class: basically
defined as
people
who have full-time jobs or at least jobs that
provide
sufficient
income for the core necessities (shelter,
clothing, food,
transportation, sanitation, communication), but who have
little or
no ownership stake. This includes people who are
in
business for
themselves, but earning a working class income:
they own
their employment, but their economic wellbeing is at the
same
level as
that of a wage-worker.
The lumpenproletariat is the level below that:
basically
defined
as people whose employment is marginal at best,
and whose
access to
the basic necessities is frequently interrupted
in some
way. The
unemployed, homeless, couch-surfers (another form
of
homelessness), people who live at the margins of the law in
order
to survive, and people who earn their livings on
criminal
activity.
This also includes wage-workers whose wage income
is not
sufficient
to provide their basic necessities from month to
month:
they have
jobs, but their economic wellbeing is at the same
level as
that of
someone who's marginally employed at best.
Decades ago, the Bay Area left/radical community
made the
deadly
strategic error of embracing the (essentially
Maoist)
analysis that
the lumpenproletariat is the revolutionary class.
This
error continues to this day, in the ideology of Black Block
tactics, which are founded on the idea that expressing rage
and
provoking
police over-reaction will somehow spark The
Revolution.
The very same tactic in more obviously violent
form pops up
in the
ideology of the extreme right: such as the
Hutaree, a group
that
was busted by the FBI for planning to shoot a
bunch of cops
and then set off bombs at their funerals, in the attempt to
provoke martial law and thereby set off a "revolution" from
the extreme right.
But here's the nexus of the problem:
To the oligarchy, the lumpenproletariat is
disposable:
their roles
in production and consumption are so minimal that
they can
be totally disregarded. They have NO power. N-O power. As
individuals or as any kind of collectivity or class.
When a social movement identifies with the
lumpenproletariat
and/or attempts to organize the lumpenproletariat, the
movement effectively short-circuits its efforts into
something that is inherently doomed to failure. They may as
well be trying to organize the squirrels on the Cal Berkeley
campus to strike for better teaching-assistant salaries. How
seriously do you
think the
UC Regents would take the threat of a squirrel
strike?
The proletariat is where the power is: the power
to produce
and consume at the level that drives the engine of
oligarchy,
is also
the power to refuse consent in a meaningful way.
The power of the proletariat takes two forms:
One, the power to remove themselves from the
oligarch's
engines of
production: by going on strike (which translates
to the
power of
collective bargaining), by going into business
for
themselves, and
by developing alternatives to conventional
capitalism such
as cooperatives and other forms of production that
subordinate
capital
to labor.
Two, the power to remove themselves from the
oligarch's
consumption matrix: by boycotts (consumer strikes), by
anti-materialist or "simple living" principles that reduce
consumption levels (the equivalent of consumer general
strikes), by
shifting their consumption to alternative
institutions such
as coops, credit unions, and small local producers (e.g.
buying veggies at the farmers' market rather than Safeway),
and very importantly for _us_ as hackers/makers/etc., the
power to build for our own use.
This is real power. It's the power that
makes the
oligarchs quake
in their boots and have nightmares. And it's
the power
that gives
the oligarchs strong incentive to keep us
distracted,
digressed,
and disempowered by wasting our time trying to
organize a
squirrel
strike.
-G.
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